


Measure

by WahlBuilder



Category: Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Closure, Gen, Rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21886030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Roy is asked to help with cleaning the Chapel. Sean has his worries and doubts.
Relationships: Melvin Mancer & Roy (Mars: War Logs), Melvin Mancer & Sean Mancer, Sean Mancer & Roy
Kudos: 1





	Measure

Sean isn’t sure why their fathers asked Roy to come here, why they asked Sean himself and Melvin to accompany him. But Sean has his guesses.

The Chapel — and the crypt — is the only place that has ever been, truly, theirs. The dormitories and the Academy shouldn’t even be spoken about, open to surveillance, to outside control as they were; but the Chapel was theirs no only because nobody but them can physically access it. It was a place where they could shrug off their military coats, so to speak, even as the Abundance banners and the Abundance crest marked it. The statues with banners, the crest have always been superficial — the chalice, the centerpiece are not. The place where their most intimate ceremonies are — were — conducted, few as they were. And for the most recent generations, it was theirs in a more personal sense: a place where Ian’s office was, and the small library, and Connor could be found here if he wasn’t on the front or in the Academy. The office where, yes, Ian signed the death orders — the orders to the front, but also where one could come and unload oneself, or simply doze on the couch while the Great Master worked.

Though Sean can admit his experiences are not universal.

The invasion of the Chapel, he thinks, therefore is not just an invasion of a physical space. The Chapel is violated, it is not their place of peace anymore. They would have never felt safe in it. And yet it is a part of their history: here, the pieces of the deceased’s staves stay hammered to the centerpiece. Silent, wordless monuments remember those who had gone before.

They walk through the crypt, and it can be hardly believed that here Sean’s family fought for their lives — but here and there he sees chipped metal, nails lodged into monuments. He tries not to think that he was far away from it, wallowing in his misery, allowing himself to sink into the abyss. Idiot. Weakling.

Mel’s field brushes his, and their eyes meet. Mel doesn’t shake his head or nod, his eyes don’t soften; he just watches. And Sean feels... absolved, in some way. Mel was here, and Mel doesn’t blame him, so maybe it’s alright. It turned out alright.

Sean can almost taste the faint metallic sting of a charge spent.

Mel lingers by a wall, reaches out though drops his hand without touching, and it closes into a fist. “I panicked.” He sounds angry — that dark, quiet anger that Sean always dreads.

“You did what you could,” Sean tells him. He’s heard it only from the words of others. Mel doesn’t talk about it, just like he barely talks about his experiences on the front.

Sometimes, Sean feels like he doesn’t know his elder brother at all.

“If not for Zach’s leadership and quick thinking…” Mel continues, and Sean would like to make him stop. This self-flagellation never brought them anywhere good, and sometimes drove them to ugly fights. But they are not alone now.

“And yet they looked to you to guide them also,” Roy says, looking at Mel, his face, as it often is, unreadable.

In stubbornness, these two can rival each other.

Mel tilts his chin up. There are dark grooves there now, the same that Dandolo’s face bears. It suits Mel. Noctis suits him like Ophir never could.

Roy turns away. “Let’s get this over with.” He walks ahead. His steps don’t echo — in his strange attire, he is silent and impossible to feel — which is a strange illusion. Or rather, self-delusion: Roy’s presence is difficult to notice, technomantically-speaking, because they are, themselves, in that presence. Everything is. It’s like trying to notice air. They walk in his Shadow. It is, too, an absolution, Sean feels.

Metal is chipped, unpolished, marred by fighting — but the striking blue and gold of Roy’s attire, the white of his staff, the evenly pulsating Heart of Darkness still scatter in reflections.

Roy gets up to the door to the Chapel proper and turns to them. He can open the door by himself — but this is not even a courtesy, but a kindness. Asking for permission, giving them time to prepare themselves. Or a chance to turn back.

But Sean wonders whether this seeming rush is because Roy feels unwelcome here.

“We can do this ourselves,” Sean says quietly, his own hesitations and cowardice be damned.

Roy tilts his head. “No, you can’t. You can clean up, sure, but to be… reset, that un-made place needs un-normal people: you, Sean, who wasn’t there; Melvin, who isn’t entirely of your Order anymore; and I, who—”

“Roy…”

“—is all different.” His mouth twists for a moment, then he turns away.

Sean knows his family can be overbearing. Technomancers need a company of their own, it is just practical, but it is an almost physical need, it seems. To be understood, to feel a touch of another’s field, conscious, controlled and not just passively generated. To know that you are not just… crazy.

It’s not difficult to remember that Roy is different: his words, his field, his movement, his clothes are unfamiliar. But to really _feel_ what it means is harder. That Roy grew up in a different culture, with different opportunities, struggles, way of thinking, though the two Orders are in many ways alike.

And Roy didn’t feel like he belonged there, and Sean knows now that one of the things Roy hates the most is people trying to define him.

Maybe he feels that being asked this is such an instance.

Sean rarely allows his emotions to show — he molds them into something that is unlikely to hurt his family; he makes a scene, strikes a pose, spits acid to let his emotions trickle out, but not drown the world in a deluge. He can’t afford it.

But here, he’s with his closest brother, whom Sean has disappointed and used time and time again; and here is his new, strange brother, who can reach out and measure his heart on the cosmic scales, giving a verdict over things Sean prefers to forget.

Sean goes up to one of the plates. “We should go to one of the old haunts later. Introduce you to a friend or two.”

“I’ve been to Ophir before.”

Mel huffs. “Not like with us, you didn’t. Setting entire blocks on fire—”

Sean splutters. “That was just one time, and not even my fault!”

Roy chuckles. “Yeah right.”

They have donned the long dark gray, Mel and Sean; the occasion calls for it. But instead of the Abundance pin, Sean carries nothing, and Mel has that silver-black raven brooch pinned, a chain hanging from his neck. Sean knows Mel never felt at home — anywhere; they all failed him, while he was trying not to fail them. But now, he has a home, and Sean is happy for him, even though sometimes he’s a little jealous. Before, Abundance and war stole Sean’s brother from him, and though he raged against it, he knew he could change nothing; now, Mel is his — but most of all, Noctis’s, Dandolo’s, and it would seem to be so easy to rage over that, to demand they return Mel to Sean — but they are Mel’s home. They have marked Mel — and he wanted it. Loves them for it.

With Roy and Mel, Sean suddenly feels like the most underdressed.

He swallows, raising his hand to a plate. He feels like a cadet before his final test in an ancient dome, when it was just him and Connor. His heart racing in fear. He presses his hand to the plate, sending a charge through it — ‘Fluid’, Roy calls it. Feels with a start the brush of Mel’s charge, potent from being always so tightly condensed.

The door opens heavy, slow, as though reluctant to open the—

Sean steps back, again, again — nearly falls.

He listened to them talking about it (Zachariah’s voice even but hands shaking in rage; Alan silent and very pale). But it did nothing to prepare him for it.

There is a metallic reek in the air, sharp, slicing into the nose and brain — floating above the heavy reek of fried meat. It _shouldn’t_ be here, it’s been so long! But air doesn’t flow, the fighting must have ruined ventilation, and it was sealed, and...

“What a waste.” Roy’s voice echoes. It shouldn’t be, the acoustics should be ruined — and yet it does, because it’s Roy, the Conduit, whatever the fuck that even means, and Sean hates him for it, for coming here as a stranger, and passing judgment, and...

_No_. Sean forces himself to think this word. _No_.

Sean wonders what would have been if they had grown together, helped each other through—

Abundance would have swallowed Roy whole.

But as much as he wished they’d grown up together (a selfish wish, because Sean wasn’t alone), Sean puts it aside as frivolous. Abundance would have swallowed Roy up without chewing, destroyed his mind and body.

They would have loved him. They would have given him a place to belong...

And then Abundance would have swallowed him whole.

Roy throws his head back, looking up at the lights in the high ceiling. “Still have some charge left... It will be enough.”

Sean doesn’t know why his fathers asked Roy for this. Nobody would agree to come here — it is un-normal now. And Roy is, too. But he is also — was, is, however he defines it — a monk, a priest. A legend. He can consign this place to stories instead of raw wounds.

“Mel is the one who usually rages,” Roy notes — without malice.

Sean swallows. “I’m not... raging.”

“I think you are. I think you hate me. It’s alright. I’m used to your anger and your hate.”

Sean glances at Mel — whose face is unreadable now — and before Sean can tumble into guilt or find some words that would drip with acid, Roy taps the staff. It makes a strange noise, ringing like theirs, but differently. Melodious. Roy lets go.

The staff remains upright, swaying slightly, like a pendulum. Right. Left. Right. Half-seconds.

“You know,” Roy says, his voice even, “I could have told your fathers, your elders, that I’m done with being treated like a monk or a priest by those who don’t even know what that means. Being asked to perform like a trained mole: dance your dances, Roy. Being seen as a solution to all of the world’s woes.” His voice has risen, ringing in the walls themselves. “But I was taught to do kindness nonetheless, no matter what, even when I don’t feel kind. I was taught that, when anger rises in me, to look at others as though at children. I wouldn’t strike at a child, would I? Wouldn’t yell at a child. But I never wanted children. Probably because of that.”

Left. Right. Left.

Melvin steps forward, ever the brave one. “You don’t have to do this, Roy.”

Roy turns to him, head tilted to the right shoulder. “ _You_ know what it’s like, to want to trade _everything_ just to be like them, to be among them—and then, with time, to realize that you can’t, and you don’t even want to.”

They are silent, then Mel nods solemnly. “Yes. I know. And I apologize. We are using you. But you can leave.”

“No, I’m not leaving. I only wanted you to know that I’m not doing this because I’m feeling kind. But this is a kindness, and a duty to do, and I’m the only one crazy enough to think of the way I want to do it, and the only one who _can_ do it. But… thank you for your apology.” Roy turns his back to them again.

He lowers himself onto the floor — among debris, broken pews, charred bodies, as though all this is his doing and he doesn’t care. A god of destruction — about to sing the new beginning after he’s destroyed the old world, only he needs to clean up a bit. Roy presses his right be-clawed hand flat to the floor, leaning forward slightly.

“There is a religion in Abundance, isn’t there?” Roy says. His casual tone contrasts with the solemnity and mystery of whatever he is working on here. Sean doesn’t think he will ever get used to these contradictions in Roy.

But he can sneer. Catch the conversation. Exchange blows and ideas — even as sometimes he can’t help goading Roy until both of them snap. “Yes, and it’s called ideology.”

“Ah yes. The Imperial Creed. The Emperor isn’t a god. Yes.”

Sean isn’t sure what Roy is referring to. A strange situation to find himself in. That is what it feels like, he thinks, when he throws in some obscure reference for his own amusement.

Roy says something in a language Sean doesn’t understand and can’t quite place — one of the Alliance, perhaps? Mel snorts and finishes it in the same language. Sean almost wants to pout — but it is petulance, and they deserve better. Their bond deserves better. So he stays silent and tells himself that he doesn’t have to feel kind to do kindness.

Mel moves, reaching to the pouch strung to his belt. It is to him that Roy has trusted it. Maybe Roy knew Sean would be full of hatred. Maybe Sean has never stopped being full of hatred.

Sean wasn’t here. He wasn’t here when they were dying, when Connor and Ian chose to sacrifice themselves, and nearly did, and it was that Connor was more of a soldier and it was that they had been together, a pair, for decades, that they had managed to leave and get to safety and reach Noctis.

Not due to Sean’s help. He _wasn’t there_. He was giving up — while they were still fighting. He was—

“Stuff it.”

Why does Roy’s voice echo?

“Melvin, if you please?”

Mel undoes the strings on the pouch one-handed. He scoops the salt and throws it to Roy. It’s coarse salt — and crystals hang in the air like a cloud, and _glow_.

For this, Sean hates Roy, too. But deep in his heart, he knows he hates _himself_ — for showing off, putting on masks. _This_ is not a mask. Roy is a genuine thing. Doesn’t matter that they don’t understand. He doesn’t care. He just is.

Sean shifts awkwardly. What is he doing here? He lost the right to return, to witness this, when he wasn’t here.

A touch brushes his hand, as though fingers though _not_ — the pressure of a field, just for a moment.

He looks at Mel, and Mel’s light eyes are full of sadness and love. Sean’s heart aches. He’s thinking about himself again, always only about himself. It must be hard for Mel, much harder than for him. Mel _was_ here.

Movement catches Sean’s attention: Roy raises his left hand, covered, like everything else except for his head, by cables and wires of the bodyglove. Roy stays for a moment like this — then his fingers fold, middle and ring finger, and thumb curling to them — and a heavy wave, or a weight, or something — the air — hits Sean like a hammer — if a hammer could strike from all sides at once. It presses into him, his body, his very bones, vibrating lowly, and he can almost, almost hear it — on the lower edge of possibility.

He opens his mouth, Mel’s hand rightens him. He can’t say a word.

Mel catches his gaze and, moving with visible struggle, signs.

_It’s his voice._

The pressure eases somewhat, and Sean can think, can stand on his own — can hear it, too, overlayed on this low pressure: a drone in four hundred voices, not a cacophony but a primordial chorus the likes of which the world must not have known for ages. Or rather, humans didn’t know. The low, esoteric voice of a planet.

The pressure builds again, just for a moment — and the scattered bodies explode into clouds of gray dust. The clouds shimmer, ripples run through them with changes of the chorus, and they become thinner, thinner, smaller, until there is nothing left.

Or rather, Sean cannot see them anymore.

He looks at Roy, just when Roy unbends his fingers again, palm open and relaxed.

The pressure is gone, though not entirely. It is now more like a reassuring embrace, and the sounds arrange into a melody. And Sean feels something else. Hears it or...

He feels dumbed, the words he weaves into a cocoon escaping him.

He turns round. The centerpiece is trickling down, like in a strange dream, like Mel’s pastels melting away — but there is a purpose to it, a vector. Some of it flakes off but the particles keep close to the stream that goes down, down, silvery, to the floor, trickling through the ages-old grooves placed Settlers know why.

Sean feels like something is amiss, and realizes that the Abundance crest, stenciled crudely years ago and worn off by their feet, is gone now, too.

The stream runs towards Roy but doesn’t reach him. It stops a small distance before the white staff and starts going up in the air, as though climbing something. The Heart of Darkness pulses in time with Roy’s singing.

Sean feels something akin to the sensations he had when he died.

It wasn’t just a brush with death — he _did_ die, really, fully. To anyone who asks he would have said that his mind simply shields him from the memory, but to Zachariah, who did ask in a quiet moment, he told a different truth: he was so self-absorbed and so pumped up with charge that he felt like a tightly-wound coil, his head ringing, heavy and yet light at the same time, as though someone had unscrewed the back of his skull and was breathing right onto the jelly matter of his brain.

He did die — and then he was alive again. Because one person had had enough of suffering. Because that person had decided to change the winds of Mars — and Roy is the Conduit and all, with views obscure and eclectic when he deems to voice them, — but there is a history of a certain flavor of stubbornness running in humanity, the stubbornness that allows them to do miracles. To come to a harsh planet and adapt to it one way or another. To build a vibrant home in the endless plains and in a sprawling labyrinth of canyons. To bond and bundle together despite the odds.

To know that he is a part of one of those miracles — of many of them, in truth, — strokes Sean’s ego in exactly the right ways, overwhelming even the sense of despair and annoyance at having his fate been reversed in such a dramatic way. But then, he had chosen death, and Roy didn’t take that choice from him, he respected it.

And then gave him a new one.

Sean isn’t sure how much time passes until the stream reaches roughly the height of a staff. The shape of a staff. A ripple goes through it, then the liquid turns into small crystals, in druses, like spikes on a hound’s spine, and falls down again according to Roy’s song. The new stream flows up and undergoes the same process, but the “staff” maintains its thickness. There are grooves a palm away from each end of the staff, like the ones made for snapping in augments, and lines further to the center of the shaft, like collapse-lines.

The glowing salt stirs, and surrounds the staff, some of the crystals hovering on one place before swiftly joining metal.

The process continues for some time — Sean is fascinated, drowsy with the droning song that is not a song at all.

And then Roy goes silent. Abruptly, though Sean feels like the echo is forever imprinted in these halls.

The banners of Abundance are no more, burned away by Ian’s overload, and the Abundance crest is no more, burned away by Roy’s voice, and bodies clad in alien armor are no more — the place is cleansed. Fully, Sean feels, even though the particles should have gone _somewhere_ — but he is certain they are not part of the staff standing like a strange sibling of the white staff — or is the white staff the strange one? This metal is almost familiar: standard-issue collapsible staff of the Abundance technomancers — but there are things, too, things Sean almost recognizes. That cross-shaped upper head — isn’t it Zachariah’s staff head of preference? Those minuscule engravings along the central shaft that he can’t quite see from the distance — aren’t they like the engravings Alan bestows upon their staves? And the copper — or copper-looking — band near the lower head — Mel has almost the same adornment.

And the centerpiece is no more. The huge structure with pieces of staves hammered to it, each death adding to its weight — is now this elegant, familiar thing, marked by each of their passing.

Sean steps forward and reaches to it—

“You won’t be able to lift it. Too heavy. Compressed,” Roy says. He sounds rough, parched. He looks not at all a walking legend: his shoulders droop, and shivers run through him now and again.

Mel strides right past the made staff and bends to Roy. “Need help, brother?”

Roy holds up a hand — the left one. Sean has noticed already that Roy is careful with the claws. Mel helps Roy up, steadies him. Over their shoulders, Sean just glimpses sparks — they use electro-signing. When exhausted, Roy prefers to sign rather than talk. Talking is difficult and produces noise that might just tip him over the edge.

Sean goes past the staff. The cross-piece has a set of short spikes on the flat end of it — not Zachariah’s but... Ian’s, Sean realizes, although the spikes here are more numerous.

The white staff still sways rhythmically.

Sean doesn’t put a hand on Roy, but asks, keeping his voice low: “Do you need water?”

“No,” Roy breathes out. “Not now. Or I’ll... Not now.” He drops his arm off Mel’s forearm and closes his eyes briefly. At least the shivers have subdued, but he looks too pale, and Sean worries.

Roy’s body doesn’t work as theirs, and this… procedure has evidently took a lot of him. He’s drained himself to perform all this — for them.

“We can clean up more, later,” Roy says, turning round. “The benches.”

“And you should rest,” Mel says. Sean hopes that their joint stubbornness would be enough to make Roy do so.

“Eh, it’s alright.” Roy walks to the staves, taps the top of the new staff with a claw.

There’s no... sound, exactly, but there is something. Like the first race of current through the bone. When one _feels_ it, inside, sharp and impossible but still there.

“It will take me time to solidify it further,” Roy says, head tilted to the right shoulder. “And organise... means of carrying it. But I can do that while away.” He rolls his shoulders, fixes the blue cloth thrown over his left shoulder. All of this is fitting to him, and he’s raised quite a stir in the city, striding like this. Unashamed and unwilling to hide.

Sean can admit he’s proud.

Roy looks at them. “You promised me drinks and a wild venture into the Slums and a new friend.”

Mel chuckles. He does it more often, these days. “You don’t even drink, and Sean _shouldn’t_ drink.”

Sean sends an arc to Mel, which Mel, of course, deflects.

“Don’t they have hot chocolate here?”

Sean snorts. “A Triangle to the bone. I doubt Ethan even heard of such things, in _Curiosity’s_.”

Roy makes a terribly outrageous face — in which Sean recognizes himself, and knows what words are coming. “Absolutely _barbaric_! You’re paying.” Roy doesn’t pick the white staff as he passes it. Their work isn’t finished here, but there is no rush.

Before they leave, Sean throws a glance over his shoulder.

The white staff keeps swaying. Sending merry lights dance through the Chapel.

Left. Right.

Left. Right.

**Author's Note:**

> =*


End file.
